random notes of a skeptical geologist

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I shot these gigapans recently, while we were visiting some deep-water rocks in County Clare, Ireland (see more detail on these rocks and a few photos from the trip). One afternoon we took some time off from the turbidites to do a bit of geo-tourism at the Cliffs of Moher, a series of spectacular escarpments along an 8 km long stretch of the western coast of Ireland. They are 702 feet (214 meters) high at the highest point and expose Late Carboniferous (Namurian) sandstones and shales that were mostly deposited as deltaic and fluvial sediments of the Tullig and Kilkee cyclothems.

This place is one of the most visited tourist attractions in Ireland, and for a good reason: the combination of the cliffs, the landscape, and abundant wildlife is, indeed, spectacular.

I was lucky to attend a few days ago a field conference in southern Chile, looking at deep-water rocks in an area that includes Torres del Paine National Park. It was good to be back in this place of unbloggable beauty. The conference was well organized (of course! – Brian was one of the conveners) and we were extremely lucky with the weather: no rain at all on the outcrops, beautiful sunshine most of the time. Although I have been to Chilean Patagonia three times before on various geological field trips and even did some field work there, I realized during this conference that it doesn’t matter how many times you have seen some rocks, there is always a chance to rethink what you thought you have already settled in your mind (see blog title). It was also good to see that these field conferences are increasingly not just about the local geology: many if not most presentations and spontaneous discussions compare the local outcrop data with sedimentary systems from other basins, and try to think about how the always-too-small outcrops would look like in seismic sections and volumes.

Brian did not have time to take a lot of photos, so here are three shots (more here). As if anybody needed more shots of the Paine Grande and the Cuernos.

Conference participants examine the turbidites of the Punta Barrosa Formation

The Paine massif (Paine Grande and Cuernos), with Rio Serrano in the foreground

For a few months now, I have been spending (wasting?) some time with a gadget called Gigapan, a robot that can take hundreds of shots of the same scene with a simple point-and-shoot camera. The pictures are taken in a well-defined rectangular grid pattern so that there is the right amount of overlap between all neighbors. Later the photos can be stitched into a gigantic photograph on a computer and shared with the world through the Gigapan.org website and, even better, through Google Earth. [If you are a tiny bit familiar with geoblogs, you must have seen some of the gigapans that Ron Schott has put together; he is one of the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of the technology and has assembled an impressive set of panoramas on the gigapan site.]

I have to confess that I had to actually buy this thing and start playing with it to realize how different gigapixel panoramas are from the usual few-megapixel digital photographs. The idea is simple: a ten megapixel camera takes photos that contain ten million pixels; if you put together a 10×10 grid of such photographs into one image, you end up with a gigapixel panorama. Because some overlap is needed between the photographs, more than 100 pictures are necessary to exceed the gigapixel limit. But the point is that the more pixels there are in a photograph, the more information it contains and the more sense it makes to zoom in and see the details – details that are usually non-existent in a conventional digital picture. The other side of the coin is that it is only worth taking gigapans of scenes with plenty of small-scale and variable detail (although I am getting to the point that I see a potential gigapan everywhere).

I do not think that gigapixel images will replace conventional (that is, megapixel) photography. There is only a limited number of things that the human eye can see at one time; and often the value of a good photograph comes not from the pixels it captures, but from the ones it consciously ignores. Beauty and the message an image can hold are scale-dependent; and zooming in to see the irrelevant detail could be a distraction.

That being said, I am all for taking home as many pixels as possible from outcrops and landscapes in general. The gigapan system is simple and works surprisingly well, and it *is* exciting to explore big outcrop panels from the scale of entire depositional systems to the laminae of single ripples or even grains.

No photos or panoramas posted/embedded this time; but here is a link to my giga-experiments.